2024 recap and 2025 resolutions

Written By Lucía Carrión

2024 recap

As the end of the year approaches, I’m starting to get ready for another list of New Year’s resolutions. One of the first things I’m doing is checking whether I succeeded in any of the ones I had for 2024. Let’s see.

Korean ✅

I’ve been studying Korean for 8 years now. I’m, in my humble opinion, incredibly bad at it. Sure, I can talk some, but after 8 years, I better… As you can see, I don’t have the highest opinion of my own ability, but I had nothing to actually prove this. That’s why this year I wanted to take the TOPIK (the proficiency test of Korean). There are two: TOPIK I, which tests from level 1 to level 2, and TOPIK II, which tests from level 3 to level 6. I wanted to do the first one, cause I thought that it would be better to do one that I for sure could pass, but my friends from the academy convinced me to join in their pain and take the second.

And so I did. And I can proudly say that I ended up with the level 3 (122 points out of 300). I was incredibly happy about it! Though not entirely satisfied (I’m sorry, apparently I’m a perfectionist. I gotta work on that, I know).

Writing ❌

Bad. This went really bad.

  • I wanted to finish a script. It’s not finished yet.

  • I wanted to write a first draft of a novel. I started it and but started another one and didn’t finish either of them.

  • I wanted to do NaNoWriMo. I’m so sorry to my writer-buddy Lucas, whom I enrolled in this one too, so we could suffer together. We failed. But Ily anyways.

Work ✅

Context: I have a day job and I had to take a very difficult certification exam for it (cause the fact that you finish uni doesn’t mean you finish studying y’all). This actually went well. But I left it for the very last possible moment and it was unnecessarily stressful. 10/10 would not recommend.

Overall

2/3 (ish) completed. I’m happy. And at the same time, I’m not. Mostly because the ones that I was more interested on were the ones involving writing but those are also the ones that are the hardest. My writing habit this year has been all over the place and that’s not good. So… This 2025 we’re going to fix that and also get some new resolutions!

2025 resolutions!

  1. Get the 4th level in the TOPIK

    I want to take that exam again. I want my friends to pass it too. I know that’s not really up to me, but I’ll hype them up and try again with them. To get the 3rd level I had to get more than 120 and I only got 122, so it feels like I barely pass. I keep wondering if luck had anything to do with it and that bothers me, so I’ll take it again and do better.

  2. Completely write a novel

    I realize it might be a bit daunting to think about writing a whole novel when one of my goals this year was to write a first draft and I didn’t complete it, but I think if I don’t set these types of goals I wouldn’t even start.

  3. Write a script and put it out there (either film it or join a festival)

    I’ve been writing scripts for more than 6 years now and I haven’t done much with a lot of them. I want to fix that. I want to be proactive about my writing and I think these two goals will help me do it.

  4. I started a second degree, I’d like to keep an average of 8

    Lastly, the uni degree. I already have one in something related to computer science and I’ve been working thanks to it since 2019. I think it’s time to study something that I actually wanted and that’s English Philology. I’m just going to take 3 subjects each term so it’ll take a while, but considering I’m doing it because I want to I’m not in any hurry.

Join in

I’ll keep you posted about my goals. If you have them as well I hope this encourages you to keep them up. Let’s have a wonderful 2025 where we work towards our dreams!

Lucía Carrión